Oracle Blog

Mark Dixon's quest to explore the world of Identity Management

Thursday Feb 28, 2008

Well, the cat is out of the bag. I can now blog about the major initiative that has been monopolizing my time for the past six months.

This morning, Slashdot picked up the post by BobB-nw: "Telecommunication companies need to go beyond just providing bandwidth and look into acquiring Internet destination sites that are heavily trafficked, says Sun Microsystems Chairman Scott McNealy. "I have explained to every telco that either you become a destination site, or the destination site will become a telco," McNealy said at a news conference at Sun Microsystems' Worldwide Education and Research Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday."

I am the guy in Sun's Americas Software Practice tabbed with leading the effort to make Scott's vision a reality for our large telecom customers. If you were here with me at Sun's Immersion Week today, you could attend my class for Sun systems engineers on the topic of Project Destination.

Project Destination is a Sun Microsystems initiative to give reality to Scott's vision that: Telcos must become "Destination Brands" or they will be only "Network Gateways" to companies that are Destination Brands (note that I said "Brand", not "Site." The term "site" is too limiting. We are talking about services delivered across the spectrum of online devices - phones, TVs and web browsers.)

What in the world does this have to do with Identity? Identity is at the very heart of delivering highly personalized, context aware services to subscribers on their choice of device. I like to call it "Identity-enabled Service Orchestration." Stay tuned over the next few weeks as I discuss issues and solutions in more detail.

About

Discovering Identity was founded on blogs.sun.com in May 2005 as a means of documenting my exploration of the field of Identity and Access Management. In February, 2010, I switched to hosting the blog at DiscoveringIdentity.com. In March 2012, I began posting Oracle-related information in both places.